Black Market Botched Botox - The Industry With No Regulations - When Beauty Turns Ugly

Black Market Botched Botox - The Industry With No Regulations - When Beauty Turns Ugly

Show Video

Hello, everybody. Welcome back to my channel, where skincare is all about progression over perfection because perfection doesn't exist. Welcome back to an episode of When Beauty Turns Ugly. It's been a while since I've done one of these, but they take a lot of research and I've not been well.

In another note, do you like the blue and the purple? Pinky purple, or do you prefer just the two? Purple? I think I... pinky purple. I don't know what color that is. Pink? I kind of think I might prefer just the pink. Let me know. But today we're going to be talking about black market Botox and some filler failures as well. And not like, oh my God, that's crazy kind of way, but in like, oh my God, that's horrible, that's horrific.

I particularly love getting Botox for a few reasons. One, my natural face is a frown. It's like a disapproving frown.

It's kind of like... What Botox does for me is kind of relaxes those muscles and kind of stops me from creating that frown. Another reason I love getting Botox is because my natural frown often causes me headaches. I'm constantly scrunching my eyes like this and it can cause a really heavy kind of like behind the eye kind of headache.

You know the ones you can hear for some reason. And you know what? It just looks good when it's done right. It gives me like a little lift in the eyebrows and it freezes everything. And when it's done right, when it's done properly by the right person, it looks really, really good. It doesn't make you look like you just can't move your face.

And that's where I feel there is a huge issue and why there is so much stigma around Botox and fillers in general is because what we see a lot of in the media is botched jobs, influencers who have been allowed to go too far, reality stars mainly, who have been allowed to go too far with their Botox and filler. And there are so many reality shows and TV shows dedicated to botched Botox. So as I said, full disclosure. I get fillet in my nose.

I get a bit here in the bridge of my nose, on my tip. I get filler in my chin to make it a bit pointier. And I get Botox up here. I haven't had Botox for a while, as you can see. So I'm going to talk mainly about Botox in this video.

We'll talk a little bit about filler. And while I'm doing that, I'm going to be showing you my natural plumping, fine line plumping routine. When it comes to a cleanser, use anything that's gentle, anything that doesn't strip you.

I feel like cleansers have become more and more personal with what you like and don't like. So I don't have a recommendation. So yeah, the next step I'm going to do, and this is one of the key steps, is hydration. I'm going to be using the Superegg Kind Atmosphere Biome Mist, just to rehydrate pretty much through every single step.

So not a lot of people know that Botox is actually a brand name. Botulinum Toxin, Type A. This is basically a neurotoxin that stops your muscles contracting. Straight in with another hydrating toner onto damp, sprayed skin. We want to hydrate.

We want to hydrate as much as possible. I'm pretty sure it's a bacteria. In fact, Botulin intoxin poisoning or Botulism was rife in Germany throughout the 18th century, with many people actually dying from this bacteria after congesting meat, many blood sausages.

Blood sausage sounds horrible, but I feel like a full English breakfast isn't a full English breakfast if you don't have black pudding. It's so good, it's so nice. But when ingested in contaminated food, it can interfere with key muscles in your body, basically causing them to completely shut down, causing paralysis and then eventually death. It was actually a gentleman called Justinus Kerner, who was a medical officer as well as a well known poet, who actually suggested that this toxin could be used, potentially be used, for treatment purposes. It wasn't actually until the 1970s that Alan B. Scott and Edward J. Schantz

used the type A serotype, which we know as Botox today. It was actually used in medicine to correct what they call squint or strabismus, which is when the eyes look in two different directions. After that hydrating toner, straight in with a spray. And since then, Botox has been used to treat so many different conditions. Jaw clenching,

severe migraines, cluster headaches, anything related really to muscle hyperactivity. April 15th, 2002 Ashanti's Foolish was number one, and I was still wearing body warmers. We're going to go in with the essence.

This is the Advanced Snail Duel Essence we have. We have snail mucin, which is going to hydrate, but also care for our skin barrier, Niacinamide as well to help even tone, and a few other bits to basically help plump out our skin. We're going to be generous with this. But it was also the day that Botox was approved. The brand Botox was approved by the FDA for cosmetic use as a temporary cosmetic treatment for moderate to severe fine lines and wrinkles.

You know, fine lines and wrinkles aren't something that needs to be treated, but if you want to, you can, you know, no judgy. Since then, it's been approved for so many different treatments and symptoms, including in 2013 when it was approved by the FDA for an overactive bladder. It's also the year Botox reached 2 billion in revenue. I believe it was like in the early nineties that the original creators of Botox sold their company for 9 million, as they really thought it was such a niche thing that no one was going to be interested in. We now know that it's the complete opposite.

Botox is an icon, you know, a pop culture icon. In fact, between 2000 and 2015, the use for Botox purely for fine lines and wrinkles rose by 759%. 15 years is actually a really long time, but again, becoming a huge part of pop culture. But of course, when anything gets really, really popular, you're going to have your issues. People really want to take advantage when they see something as a quick money maker.

And Botox is expensive, it's pricey. Depending on how many areas you get done, how many points, you're looking at anything from £300 upwards, you know, in the good places. But as I said, there are people wanting to make quick money from this. Like all industries, you have your good, your bad, and you're very ugly and crap. And currently this industry isn't regulated as much as it really should be, or that they now know it should be. So you have people with a medical background administering Botox and filler.

But on the other hand, you have people who did a one day training course doing the same thing as a medically trained professional. It was really over the pandemic when, I think as someone who's interested in Botox and filler and see a lot of that content on my Instagram, we saw so many horror stories from people who couldn't follow the lockdown rules and were going to see people injecting from their homes and sometimes even their garage, basically breaking the lockdown rules out of desperation. Like I, like I was desperate for my nose filler, I was desperate for my Botox.

But luckily, because I see someone who is amazing, my filler lasted pretty much the whole of the lockdown until they could reopen. So let's look at some of the cases where Botox and filler goes horribly, horribly wrong. Some quick cases, and then we'll get into the big stories. Warning there will be some graphic images. What I'll do is I'll tell you to look away and then I'll do like a little ding when you can look back when the images are gone.

So let's start with this graphic image warning straight away. Short story here. There's not much about this person, about this young man, but he had gone to see a practitioner who injected Botox in a garage and this was over lockdown, obviously completely unregulated. No one... it wasn't a conversion, it wasn't

like a converted, you know, garage into a clinic. It was just a garage with a bed in it. And as we can see, so many complications have occurred here. We cannot find any more information on this guy, or what happened to him, what exactly happened here, how he is now. But this is a really good example of all the botched Botox viral content that we saw over lockdown. Fox eye surgery is probably one of the biggest aesthetic trends of the last year and still this year as well. With before

and afters being posted all over TikTok. The trend is basically just to lift your eyebrows, but people have such yanked back eyebrows that it lifts their eyes up as well. In my opinion, it looks awful.

It looks terrible because it's just never done right. But recently, Jessie Carr from Australia went viral for this treatment, going horribly, horribly wrong, saying that the fox eye threads that she had was one of her biggest regrets. I'm going to go in with another layer of toner before doing my next serum. Toning between each step, whether it's a spray or like this, really helps plump out your skin, keeps it hydrated. If you want your makeup to look nice under as well, I think it's a good thing to do to have that kind of smooth, even plumped-up canvas with no dry skin anywhere.

I don't know, ask Robert. I don't know. So basically, Jessie chose the company that she did to do her fox eye threads because they had used this picture of Bella Hadid, claiming that it was the same procedure that she had done. And Jessie liked the look of it. And she thought, you know, if I can get similar results to what Bella Hadid has done, then this is what I want done. I'm going to go to these people.

And this particular procedure. However, what Bella Hadid had done is more of like a facelift. So they kind of cut the skin and pull it up.

There's no thread involved. Jessie went ahead with the surgery. She was on a lot of gas to pretty much numb her. But one thing she remembers, and she couldn't remember whether it was just in her head because she was on so much gas, but she felt cold liquid running down her face and no one was really saying anything.

She thought she was pretty much imagining it. Surgery is done and it's really, really not what she wanted. And I feel so bad for her.

Not only was one eyebrow higher than the other, where basically one thread had snapped pretty much, but during the healing stage, she was in so much pain and her face just started to swell up. It became bruised. It looked really bad. It looked like she had a really bad allergic reaction. Later, she actually found out that the cold liquid running down her face was blood and it had burst a blood vessel in her face whilst they were actually injecting the anesthetic, making her whole face swell. She is now left with what she refers to as horns either side of her eyes.

And this is what we see in a lot of people who have had threads, and it just looks terrible. It looks so bad. It just never seems to go right.

She's actually having treatment now to essentially melt away those threads so that her eyebrows will just go back into the right position and that the bumps on the sides of her head will just completely go. There is a reason most surgeons, practitioners, people who do Botox and filler will not do these, will not do these, because they're dangerous. They are so dangerous, they're never done right and they can leave so much scarring. I was looking through some of the comments on these TikTok videos. And there's one that stuck out to me in particular, saying that this is really the reason why they wish celebrities were more transparent about the work they had done. And I really, really agree with this.

I feel like Botox, filler, aesthetics in general is going to be something that's going to be around for... forever. You know? It's no different now to coloring your hair. It actually takes less time than getting your hair colored, you know? And I think the stigma around it needs to go as well, because then we have things like this. We have these businesses using before and after pictures of celebrities pretty much pretending that they've had work done there, or this is the same procedure that they've had done. Or the celebrity is famous for having the exact same procedure when it's not.

We don't know because we don't know for a fact what they've had done because they keep it so secret. So let's talk about some of the bigger stories, starting with Victoria Lee. She says that she was scarred for life after a botched Botox injections, well, anti wrinkle injections at an acquaintance's house.

Now, Lee, who is 41, is a makeup artist from Essex. She didn't believe there was any reason to be worried about all the Botox she was having done. It was at an acquaintance's house. It was just a little injection. You know, she's had Botox before. So this would actually be the first time Victoria is seeing this lady and her friend.

This lady traveled down to do their Botox after the first lockdown, and Victoria found it absolutely fine. And all did go fine. All initially went well.

However, the second time this lady administered the Botox, it hurt more than usual. Sorry, I'm going to re-damp my skin. You don't have to do it, just tone inbetween each step. But I'm talking so much everything is drying down.

So I'm going to go in with a healing ampoule, this by MGB Skin, the Bio Cell Potion. This is just really nice and soothing and healing for my skin. I believe it's Centella. Lee began to notice odd marks on her skin, almost like little breakouts. But they grew and they grew. They became worse and worse, until they basically became large, pussey, bloody spots on her face.

She couldn't leave the house. She couldn't go to work. How can you when your face is non-stop dripping blood and pus? You can't. It's horrific. Lee say's, it was horrendous. She says she just got fat, lethargic, tearful and very down.

She said she cried all the time. She said when she would get out of the shower and pat your hair dry, she said blood would just be pouring down her face. She actually contacted the practitioner, who eventually agreed to put her in touch with the supplier of the product that was used. The company basically were unable to help. They said whatever this practitioner had used was not what she should have used. From this, we could only guess that the practitioner actually had some kind of budget or discount version of the very few FDA-approved, well known Botox brands out there, anti-wrinkle brands out there, possibly that was bought on the black market.

And we'll talk about black market in a bit. So Lee actually booked an appointment with her GP after this. The best thing to do. Who prescribed her antibiotics and

told to see a Dermatologist. Biopsies were carried out. The areas of the pussey blood were drained, not necessarily healed, but made better. But now, to this day, Lee actually now gets filler injections behind these marks because they left dents in her head. It's horrible to think that she went in, you know, probably excited about getting her usual Botox. It makes her confident, it makes her feel happy.

And she came out worse off and now it's scarred her for life.And she has to get filler, but not in the way she usually likes to. But that can only work to a certain extent. She says, you know, I'm scarred for life. These marks on my face will never go and she's actually been told that. She says, I'm 41 and I should be in my prime.

I've now got a job in the salon three days a week to get me back out there slowly. But you work in front of a mirror all the time. You can't get away from it.

I can't imagine anything so horrific, so horrific. And honestly, until I saw the people that I saw, I was scared to get something like this done as well. It's your face, you know. It's your face and there are so many complications that can arise. You have so many what, like veins and stuff in your face.

I'm obviously not medically trained, but so much can go wrong. Now, we actually stumbled across a documentary whilst doing this research that has Lee in. There's a really, really good documentary on the BBC called Under The Skin, The Botched Beauty Business, where presenter and beauty blogger Anchal Seda takes a deeper dive into the world of botched botox and filler. In this documentary, they actually revealed the lady who injected Victoria Lee undergone only one day of training. One day of training and this lady was putting needles in someone's face. It's going to get worse.

You wait till you see what's coming up. It's horrible. What's more, is eight other people have actually come forward and said they suffered the same complications from the same practitioner. This isn't necessary to do every day, but I want to plump my skin before I go out, and just kind of give it the extra boost. I'm going to put on a Ceramide serum that's also hydrating and moisturizing to care for my skin, but also plump it. And what I'm going to do is I'm not going to rub this in fully, I'm just going to kind of place this over my skin, and then I'm going to take an eye cream.

Any eye cream can do. You know your favorite eye cream. This is the Saturday Skin Yuzu Vitamin C Bright Eye cream, one of my favorites. It's kind of thick, but goes on so hydrating. So another well-documented case that you'll see online is that of Faye Page, who also was in this documentary.

So Faye Page is actually a brow technician and to put it very simply, she was so lucky not to actually lose her sight. I'm going to be putting on reusable silicone mask on now. This is the Avantgarde from Experiment, the big head size. It's got these stretchy bits behind the ear so it fits more perfectly.

This is going to look a little bit weird, but do bear with me while I talk with this on. This is basically going to help lock in my serums, my toners, and just help them do their job better, basically. She was lucky not to lose her sight after going in for Botox, but ended up having botched filler. Unfortunately, at this time, her usual lady wasn't available. It's a good sign when they get booked up, you know. It's worth the wait.

So she decided to go with somebody else. I don't know if she was recommended through a friend, but she found someone else. And actually during this appointment as well, she decided to have some last minute filler. I'm going to wait ten minutes and I'll come back and I'll take this off. Okay, so we're going to take this off. I feel dewy, I feel plump.

Everything is kind of like rubbed in nicely and sunk into the skin. So, yes, she decided to have filler actually in the same place as I do. So the bridge of the nose and the tip of the nose as well. A lot of people argue that this is the most dangerous place to inject on your face. There are a lot of nerves, a lot of things, veins and stuff here.

And if you hit the wrong thing, you can go blind. It's something I'm warned about before every injection. Faye goes on to say that had she gone to sleep that night instead of seeking urgent medical help, it's very possible that she would have lost her nose while also going blind. And even more horrifying, she was experiencing necrosis, which is the decay and death of tissue. In this documentary, they visit Dr.

Nyla, one of the UK's top cosmetic Doctors. Her clients include so many celebrities. She's got so many awards and titles and years and years, I believe ten years of education behind her names and titles. Dr Nyla actually examines Faye in this documentary and explains that the reason for this bruising that she's got, this swelling, person who injected her actually hit her dorsal nasal artery. This is the artery that provides blood to the eyes. And this is my biggest fear.

I've been so lucky since the moment I had filler to have two amazingly medically trained practitioners, one who actually specialized in reconstructive surgery. And, you know, before I even got my filler done in my nose, despite them not ever having any complications with their clients, still telling me the risks of what could potentially happen, maybe. And that's the thing, if anything was to go wrong like this, seeing someone with a medical background, they can instantly correct it, they can instantly fix it, they can give you the medical attention there and then that you need.

Faye goes on to say that she feels f*cking stupid for putting herself in that position in the first place. She says you can't put a price on your face. And this is the thing, it's not her fault. You would rightfully presume that the person sticking a needle in your face has sufficient training, the credentials to do so. But let's talk about credentials. What are the regulations? Because at the moment, it sounds like you can just go on a one day training course and start injecting people's faces.

Unfortunately, that is accurate. There are certain regulations in place and procedures, but not enough. So, legally, "practitioners in Britain should only be performing injections with licensed products on people who have had this prescribed by a registered prescriber, such as a doctor or a nurse with an additional qualification. In this area. The prescription should only

be made after an inperson consultation." So if you have a prescription, you're good to go with whoever has a needle. And this is the issue here.

Botox is a prescription only service, so you do have to see a doctor or a nurse in person, face to face, have a consultation. They ask many questions to make sure you are the right candidate for Botox. And we're going to use the most hydrating, dewiest moisturizer you can find. So I'm going to be using the Glow Recipe Plum Plump Hyaluronic cream. So currently, as I said, this industry isn't massively regulated and the law currently allows non medics to administer Botox, fillers and aesthetics. So there isn't any official training course.

There are a lot of training courses out there that only offer the courses to nurses. This looks like really shiny and dewy at the moment, so we're going to let it settle for a bit before we go onto the next step. However, there are a lot of courses, a lot of courses and training available for non nurses or people without medical background. And like with all experts, as we've said, in any industry, you get your bad and you get your terrible and illegal. Using unlicensed or counterfeit products, black market Botox.

This isn't to say that all non medics who inject are bad. That's not it at all. You get some very well trained non medics out there who go on amazing courses and invest a lot of money in these courses. But as I said, you get people who take advantage.

Now, you'd think you have to get prescription, right? So you have to see a doctor. That means that doctor must really approve of that person injecting your face, right? It's a doctor. You're in safe hands.

Well, no, there are some very corrupt doctors out there, some whose licenses have been expired or are not allowed to practice in the UK. What they do is they dish out prescriptions. They will give you a one on one consultation over the phone, which is illegal.

And what they sometimes do is charge a practitioner, one of these people have gone on a one day course, they say, for £30, I will give you four prescriptions. So, you will go and see one of these practitioners. I'm saying "practitioners", and it's fine. They're like, oh, my doctors, give me four prescriptions. Here's one for you.

Let's get on with your botox without you even have to have a consultation. Illegal. Very, very illegal. So it's going to get a bit gruesome here.

I will give you warnings. Let's take a look back at that BBC documentary, which I just became fascinated with, The Botched Beauty Business. They actually sent an undercover nurse who was actually trained to go on one of these training courses for non medics.

And when I say it's shocking what goes on on this training course, it's really an understatement. There is some blood. So this course that the nurse went on undercover was called Faye Coleens Sayers Beauty Anesthetics Training, aka Boss Babes Uni. This is actually where the nurse who injected Victoria Lee trained. I'm going to talk about this very quick because it's very gruesome and worrying, but this nurse went undercover to do a course on a thread lift, that horrible fox eye looking thing that we were talking about earlier.

As I said, this is a procedure that is basically notorious for experts saying, don't do it, I won't do it, don't get it done. It's horrible. It's one of the most difficult and potentially damaging procedures you can have done. Bear that in mind. Right, so this undercover nurse goes in, she's pretending she doesn't know what she's doing.

They've got these models, they're usually, you know, having this procedure done for free or a discount price, just so people can practice on them. She's all, like, drawn up, you know, where to inject, where to lift. And the undercover nurse is holding a needle and basically pretending she doesn't know what she's doing. She even mentions that the needle might be a little bit blunt. It's not quite penetrating the skin, it should do. And first of all, this to

administer the anesthetic. You know, the undercover nurse is like, I can't do this, I can't quite do this. Faye Coleen then proceeds to do it herself.

She takes the needle from the undercover nurse, lady who's running the training course, administers the aesthetics wrong. Very wrong. You can hear screaming agony from the model. She is in so much pain. Faye Coleen then proceeds to just do the thread lift herself. She's just going to do it herself and show the undercover nurse on this course how to do it just by looking. Again, the client is moaning in agony.

There's a lot of blood, there's a lot of blood. But Faye Coleen is done. The nurse who's gone undercover to train on this course has done nothing. She's done nothing. She's held a needle for a few minutes, but then nothing else other than a film for Faye's Snapchat. So she's done nothing.

She's not practiced on anyone. However, she leaves that day with a certificate saying that she can now perform one of the most difficult and dangerous procedures on a client. She's done nothing. She's not learnt anything. Now, Faye Coleen, who runs the course, is a nurse, but the BBC actually asked professionals to review the footage and all them were horrified, not only at the blood and the procedure being done, but the lack of hygiene and the fact that she did everything wrong in this procedure.

But so far all of this has been legal. All of this has been pretty much legal. And this is very reminiscent of a lot of the courses out there, people who are doing Botox from their living room. This is the training that a lot of them get.

So what about the black market stuff? In an article from Save Face, who are actually a national register of accredited practitioners who provide nonsurgical cosmetic treatments such as Botox and fillers. So check them out. In this article from reporter and in this case undercover journalist Charlotte Wace goes undercover and visits a beauty clinic above a high street in Wakefield. Now, she's seeing Vilnis Karklins, who is not a doctor in the UK. He trained as a doctor in Latvia, but she doesn't hold a license in the UK. He tells undercover Charlotte that she's going to need 20 points of Botox on her face.

25 points of Botox. He basically says to her that your wrinkles are very deep and they make you look five years older than her age of 30. She says Karklins has offered to treat her without a prescription. He wishes to use Botulax, a product from South Korea which is licensed there and in other countries, but not in Britain. But it's not a bad product, it's not licensed here.

But this is the issue, under the Human Medicines Regulations 2012, it's "unlawful to sell or supply an unlicensed medicine which includes practitioners selling treatments with these products. This is because they cannot be sourced through an accredited supply chain. Therefore, there's no guarantee that the vials of Botulax that have found their way into Britain are actually the product they say they are." They are most probably counterfeit with unknown substances inside fake branded boxes.

And even if the product is real, it's probably not been stored, sent, traveled in the right way to make sure the product is the best and safest it can be. He said that with Botox preferring to the licensed brand name, he says he can never do discounts. It's too expensive. He says that his clients just don't want to pay the same prices when they're not getting this done, you know, by a professional in London.

She also asked, do I need a prescription? And he said, no, nobody. That simple. He also started to describe a lip filler treatment that he offered, just suggesting that she has this lip filler done. He also suggested that he had performed this on clients as young as 16 and 17 when they came in with their family members. However, at the time of filming the documentary and writing this article, and to this day and going forward, giving Botox and filler to under eighteens is illegal, whether they have their parental permission or not. But this whole thing is actually way more common than you think.

With the Times actually reporting that beauticians openly use social media to advertise facial injections using Botulax, Innotox, and Rentox products from South Korea that are not licensed in Britain. Suppliers actually offered to sell unlicensed versions of Botox to undercover reporters with no questions about their medical training or how the product would be used. And a lot of women claim that they have been scarred for life due to the fact that they feel like their practitioners, their administers, I don't know, have been injecting with unlicensed or illegitimate products. Something has to be done, right? Botox and filler is so popular nowadays. Why isn't it regulated? Why is it not regulated? This isn't a case of medics versus non medics. This is the case of everyone getting the right training.

If I'm staying in, this would be it. If I'm going out sunscreen. Sunscreen, just because, you know, it's the best antiaging thing we can get. We don't want our skin to get dry from sun damage.

I'm using this one from Beauty Bay, which is actually very, very good. Very reminiscent of a lot of like, Korean chemical sunscreens. Well, according to The Guardian, in an article posted earlier this year, in March 2022, a new legislation will be introduced to set standards for non-surgical cosmetic treatments. After a rise of botched procedures and black market Botox, making it illegal to inject filler and Botox without a license. The Guardian goes on to say that the, "licensing scheme would aim to bring in consistent standards that people carry out non-surgical cosmetic procedures must meet, as well as setting out hygiene and safety standards for the premises." Now, this isn't, it's not as exciting as you think it's going to be.

It's going to take a while for this all to happen. The bill has to get the royal ascent in July, and basically what that means is the Queen has to be like, yeah, that's fine, I make that law. She has to formally make it law. However, that doesn't mean that from July the first, everyone will need a license.

That's not how it works. It's probably going to be another two years before we see all this implemented. They've got to set the standards.

It's so terrifying and honestly one of the main reasons why I held off getting Botox and filler for so long despite wanting it. So I'm just going to apply a lip balm. This is the Rhode Peptide Lip Treatment. Again, really, any thick balm will do.

Shiny at first, but definitely dies down. I'll talk about this more in another video. Terrifying but good things are going to happen. Legislation will be in place. What I would say again and again is, do your research, go to recommendations of friends, go and get a consultation so you can scope out the place and the practitioner before they even touch your face. But, yeah, I feel so bad for these people.

There's nothing worse than going in thinking that you're going to improve the way you look, then coming out completely destroyed. It's terrifying. It's so sad and so upsetting. Let me know what you think about all this in the comments down below.

Have you seen any really bad botched things? Botched Botox and filler. I know we've all seen a lot of bad filler. But you can watch the rest of the When Beauty Turns Ugly playlist here and some general lighter entertainment here. And I'll see you over there.

2022-07-05 09:39

Show Video

Other news